The use of hosted services, or applications, for a number of corporate functions is now common. Companies, especially small or medium enterprises (SMEs), may find they face an array of bills and separate administration interfaces for each hosted service. AppDirect, Inc., offers a Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS) solution to address this. The AppDirect service allows channel partners to quickly establish application marketplaces to resell developer applications. This allows multiple companies to set up business-to-business marketplaces for selling applications to their customers quickly. Thus, Deutsche Telecom and Bell Canada could quickly establish marketplaces for their customers. Those customers could use the respective marketplace via AppDirect to get a single unified bill and administration interface across the offerings of multiple developers.
In this model, developers are still required to plan, develop, and build separate interfaces for directly sold applications that are distinct from the integration application programmer interface (API) used for indirectly selling applications. This adds significant unnecessary development time and other ongoing secondary administration costs, e.g. a price change must be made in multiple places. Other companies providing some partial bundles of services include: service billing, Zuora and Aria Systems; identity, Okta and Ping Identity, discovery, Jamcracker.